Monday, February 22, 2016

Gunplay

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in January 2003)

I’m an
immigrant to Canada – one of the luckiest of all immigrants in that I came here
as an English speaker, with a Canadian wife and a good job already lined up. I
wouldn’t pretend to have suffered or struggled in the way that the term
“immigrant” often connotes. Still, I’ve shared the experience of arriving in
Canada with a profound sense of fear and insecurity, of not recognizing basic
references or understanding basic rituals, then of assimilating and settling
into accepting Canada wholeheartedly as the place where I ought to be.

Ten years
ago, my wife and I had a choice between New York and Toronto. At the time I may
have been somewhat more inclined toward the former – after all, it’s New York.
But we mutually decided to come here instead. I’ve never regretted it for a
second, and I’d be very reluctant to move to the States now; I’m generally
lukewarm even about visiting there. I’ve become very disillusioned with America
(I suppose a cynical interpretation might be that this is the measure of how
I’ve become Canadian). It’s de rigeur to be a detractor of George W. Bush, but
my heart sinks whenever I contemplate the record to date. It’s so far beyond a
laughing matter.

The 51st State

The other
week I was watching the action movie Formula
51. In its European release it was called The 51st State, which alludes to Britain, where most of
the action is set, as an appendage of the US. There’s a scene where a Liverpool
drug dealer played by Rhys Ifans (a former schoolmate of mine in Wales, readers
may recall) lays out a vast arsenal of high-tech guns for the inspection of an
assassin played by Emily Mortimer (the winsome younger sister from Lovely and Amazing). It’s one of those
scenes that wallows in the intimacy of destructive possibility, of
Schwarzenegger-type murderous potential dropped into your back yard. I was
rather taken aback at the crassness of it. And then it struck me – I couldn’t
imagine something like this in a Canadian film.

Not that
I’ve seen every Canadian film, of course, so there may be some evidence to the
contrary that I’m not aware of. But if there is, it’s an anomaly. British films
increasingly spawn that kind of posturing – think of Guy Ritchie movies (pre-Swept Away), Gangster No. 1, numerous
other Rhys Ifans movies. And yet, British gun control is even tougher than
Canada’s, and the murder rate is almost as low. Not to mention that given the
geographical distance, Canada ought to be far more susceptible to cultural
influence from the south. But we seem to retain our decorum in a way that
others, frankly, don’t.

Michael
Moore’s Bowling for Columbine
explores America’s gun culture, with the bear-like Moore doing his familiar
sub-Letterman shtick with a variety of nuts and celebrities (most prominently,
NRA president Charlton Heston), weaving in some broader reflections on what led
the country to its wretched state. The movie effectively establishes its key
thesis – that America’s propensity for guns and violence is correlated with a
pervasive excess of fear: fear of violent crime, home invasion, fear itself,
and of more esoteric threats that fade in and out, like shark attacks and
killer bees. The sensationalist media feeds this frenzy; so do the swaggering
language of politicians, the coarse popular culture, and a bastardization of
the country’s “traditions.” Guns in such jumpy hands breed violence that seems
to reinforce the original fear, leading to more guns and more violence – a
delusional, sick spiral.

Litmus tests

The movie
is rife with omissions though. Most prominently – Moore says he’s a lifelong
member of the NRA, and although he says in interviews that he merely holds his
membership for contrarian purposes, this isn’t clear from the film. It never
actually proposes banning personal use of guns, and says nothing about control
measures stopping short of that. It just keeps reasserting the broad,
relatively easy point that America has too many guns.

But, and
here’s the surprise, it allegedly doesn’t have so many more guns than Canada,
on a per capita basis (according to the movie). So Moore comes to Sarnia and
Windsor and Toronto, where he “discovers” that Toronto’s “slums” look like
America’s middle-class neighborhoods, and no one locks their doors. Which makes
you wonder about the accuracy of what he shows us of America. But still, he
captures the key point: that Canada avoids America’s neuroses and rhetorical
excesses.

That
famous slogan “it’s the economy, stupid” wasn’t quite right, or at least isn’t
now. Americans don’t just vote the big-ticket issues. On the contrary, they
allow issues like gun control and abortion and other ideological “litmus tests”
to outweigh any subtler considerations. If they thought about it rationally,
they’d realize the substance of their lives isn’t found there. But they don’t
think, and the country thus drifts into dysfunction. The gap between rich and
poor widens to a potentially destabilizing extent, and still the Republicans
propose further tax cuts and breaks that would widen the disparity further.
America’s dealings with the rest of the world have regressed to the crudity of
good vs. evil, with the UN lectured on its lack of “backbone” and the whole
notion of international cooperation reduced to a cynical shrug.

Raw anger

The
situation demands raw anger, which isn’t Moore’s stock in trade. Not that
humour isn’t often the sharpest ideological tool. But Moore’s shtick is all too
easy to brush off. His film seems structured to highlight outrage and guffaws
in equal measure. At one point he harasses Dick Clark for what seem to me like
tenuous reasons, and he carries out one of his patented attacks on corporate
America, turning up at K-mart headquarters with two Columbine survivors,
demanding that the company stop selling handgun ammunition. When K-mart
promptly agrees, Moore seems properly non-plussed and ceases his activism, but
it’s hard to know where this really gets us. He doesn’t prescribe a broad
agenda for action. Basically, he sugars the pill (or would sugar it except
that, as I already pointed out, he doesn’t actually prescribe one). And when he
presents a catalogue of American outrages to the accompaniment of Louis
Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World,
we can only conclude we’re in the company of a pretty crass sensibility.

Obviously,
I’m letting my own preconceptions colour the review pretty heavily here. But I
think Moore’s movies demand that kind of response. Bowling for Columbine is in many ways one of last year’s most
worthwhile films. But it takes on a subject that seems to me to demand nothing
short of greatness, if it’s to avoid the kinds of easy generalizations and
woolly affirmations favoured by gun control advocates. Even so, the movie has
truth enough, and is profoundly depressing. We have but one consolation – that we’re
here rather than there – but for how long can we sustain it?

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).